Most games let you disable the UI.

Most let you play first-person.

Virtually all let you disable chat.

None force you to read about them before they're released.

None prevent you from forming a guild (advertising in-game or in forums) of like-minded players interested in role-playing.

...but if you apply zero effort, you're going to have a weaker experience (although personally I dig the atmosphere of Rift, with its cthulu-esque invasions happening across a fairly interesting world.)

I guess I'm saying that immersion is certainly possible if you approach a game with the mindset of letting immersion happen. Whereas if you allow yourself to ruin your own immersion, you'll find it's very easy to do so.

I think the right question to ask is whether a MMO is fun.

A UI without any info but just the your char in the world is immersive but not very fun. There is a balance between the two. I would MUCH rather play with all the modern UI trapping than not knowing what the heck is going on.

I haven't been immersed in any MMO I've tried in the past few years (AoC, STO, CO, APB, Rift, FFXIV, DDO, LoTRO)

Originally posted by nariusseldon

I think the right question to ask is whether a MMO is fun.

A UI without any info but just the your char in the world is immersive but not very fun. There is a balance between the two. I would MUCH rather play with all the modern UI trapping than not knowing what the heck is going on.

I would rather figure it out myself. I don't find any fun in following arrows all over the place and people with punctuation over their heads.

If you can get immersed in a P&P RPG without more than some paper and possibly a few dices you can of course get immersed in a MMO still.

But I can admit that the last game that did it for me was GW from 2005 and even that didn't have the feeling I had in some of the old games.

AoC actually got me into it for a few days but it kinda lost me after a little while. The world was actually pretty well made but it was too small, buggy and I just lost the feeling for the world after a while.

I think a game needs a certain size for it to work for me, and it also needs small details that isn't really for anything but to add to the feeling that the game is alive. Like a small part of an old fence in the middle of nowhere, a few stones that might once been part of an house, a tree with some pretty birds in or other small stuff like that.

Not too many but a few so the world actually look alive. Also the world need some planning I havn't seen in MMOs lately, you don't just place mobs and animals with certain distance from eachother for the players to kill. It is actually nice with a small part of the wood with almost nothing, maybe besides a squirrel and a few birds. 

But I do have the hope things will be better soon.

I am of course certain other people still are immersed in their games, but I feel that this is a point that can be bettered a lot.

Originally posted by skeaser

Originally posted by nariusseldon

I think the right question to ask is whether a MMO is fun.

A UI without any info but just the your char in the world is immersive but not very fun. There is a balance between the two. I would MUCH rather play with all the modern UI trapping than not knowing what the heck is going on.

I would rather figure it out myself. I don't find any fun in following arrows all over the place and people with punctuation over their heads.

That is just you. Most people do. I don't find any fun have to talk to 100 NPCs to find the 10 that have quests. It is not difficult and just tedious.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by skeaser

I would rather figure it out myself. I don't find any fun in following arrows all over the place and people with punctuation over their heads.

That is just you. Most people do. I don't find any fun have to talk to 100 NPCs to find the 10 that have quests. It is not difficult and just tedious.

For me, having all of the arrows everywhere and those incessant messages popping up on screen essentially asking if my brain is damaged or not is the epitome of tedium. When I play a game I want to use my head and be challenged, I'm not in this to follow the yellow brick road.

Sometimes when doing a book quest in Lotro I feel immersed,

Originally posted by Axehilt

Most games let you disable the UI.

Most let you play first-person.

Virtually all let you disable chat.

None force you to read about them before they're released.

None prevent you from forming a guild (advertising in-game or in forums) of like-minded players interested in role-playing.

...but if you apply zero effort, you're going to have a weaker experience (although personally I dig the atmosphere of Rift, with its cthulu-esque invasions happening across a fairly interesting world.)

I guess I'm saying that immersion is certainly possible if you approach a game with the mindset of letting immersion happen. Whereas if you allow yourself to ruin your own immersion, you'll find it's very easy to do so.

I have hard time being immersed in any mmo or any video game for that matter. I think it especially hard in an mmo due to all of the "noise" that you see or hear (UI, chat, voice chat, etcetera).

I was completely immersed in LotRO from Open Beta to Book 8.  Then, for me, it became "just another game", one which I still play.

Yeh...with in-game maps, fast travel, no risk, quest arrows, exclamation points, sparklies over objetcs...MMORPGs have become nothing but a click fest.

I haven't felt immersed since the EQ/AC days.  Vanguard ws close...but then SOE added all the things that made it similar to every other game out there.

Originally posted by Axehilt

Most games let you disable the UI.

So that I can take uncluttered screenshots or video captures.  In practice, playing without the UI bits would be an exercise in futility.

not possible. Wait for GW2 and SWTOR.

Originally posted by Homitu

You will never be as immersed as you were when you first played [insert MMO that has your personal highest nostalia value.]

Wrong.

Red Dead Redemption, which is not an MMORPG, was more immersive to me than EverQuest (which was my first 3D MMORPG). Red Dead Redemption immersiveness was because of many actual reason, not just nostalgia. Go play Red Dead Redemption and see how an RPG should be played. Too bad it's not an MMORPG. I bet you if an MMORPG plays like RDR it would be the most immersive MMROPG to hit the market.

I'm not saying RDR is a model that should be followed, if I am a designer I would even make a better immersive experience. But Red Dead Redemption is the closest successful example I can give so you'd know that immersion has nothing to do with nostalgia and that it's based on actual game features/mechanics that are long forgotten and ignored.

OP, I would suggest that attempts at creating immersion in MMORPG game settings died when players stopped caring enough to read the story text in favor of just doing the quest objective for loot and XP...

Exploring the world and culture simply isn't what people do when playing the typical MMO. I'd wager they check their combat stats more than the quest dialogue and since it's what's valued it appears more in your face. If enough people cared about immersive quality to keep a game marketable then it would be catered too more.

If i enter a game where people dont take they real life troubles into game and stick to gaming plus a world where im free and as bonus looks nice i could have a immersive feel yes. But ive lately try some games and i see mainly RL chat thats a lvl they should a shamed of my immersion already dropped 80% then i see a world in most games thats to much dictated by devs how they designed it and have not much freedom my immersion when down another 20% and i quit.

Originally posted by blazin-ace

OP, I would suggest that attempts at creating immersion in MMORPG game settings died when players stopped caring enough to read the story text in favor of just doing the quest objective for loot and XP...

 

Exploring the world and culture simply isn't what people do when playing the typical MMO. I'd wager they check their combat stats more than the quest dialogue and since it's what's valued it appears more in your face. If enough people cared about immersive quality to keep a game marketable then it would be catered too more.

Thats why im almost dont play mmo's anymore plus game community that i for most part also dont like.

Originally posted by JB47394

I found EverQuest pretty immersive for the year or so I played.

World of Warcraft (WoW) was very nicely immersive for about half an hour.  WoW destroyed my sense of immersion because of all the gubbage on the screen.  Numbers floating out of characters during combat, punctuation floating over NPC, quest boxes, spell icons, item icons and so on.  When I finally got around to raiding, it only got worse, with all the raid UI stuff to allow support characters to track the status of everyone in the raid.  It got to be more like air traffic control at O'Hare than playing at being a Tauran Druid.

EverQuest stayed immersive because the game interface was so crude.  All the information was jammed into a lttle box in the corner of my screen.  That meant that I spent the majority of my time looking at the uncluttered game world.  If the game had been usable without the floating name tags, I'd have enjoyed myself that much more.

Until MMOs can go back to a streamlined interface while keeping the game playable, I'm fairly certain I won't be able to get immersed.  Making advancement less frenetic would help quite a bit as well.  With so much change in the character, it's hard for me to think of my character as much more than a place to hang gear.  A slower pace of advancement would also give players an opportunity to learn the game world instead of racing through quests and zones using all sorts of builtin aids to guide them.

One of the things that WoW did really well to promote immersion (for me) was all the little details. The boxes stacked next to a barn with hay in them and a mouse running around were realistic even though they looked like a cartoon. The world felt alive. Well, more alive than I was used to in EQ. Theres lots of little details in almost every part of WoW (at least there was at release) I remember being quite anxious to discover every nook and cranny of that world.

I can still get pretty immersed in DDO (PvE is very immersive) and could get immersed in WAR (While PvPing) DAoC (in both PvP and PvE) when I played them. But could never get immersed in WoW or Rift

It realy just depends on what breaks the immerssion to you. Having the feeling that what you're doing is more than just filling a grocery list can be enough most of the time.